I’ve been getting some email and other notes asking about the claims that on Saturday May 21 the Rapture will occur.

Well, what can I say? Harold Camping, the guy making these claims is, to be charitable, a kook. He claimed the Rapture would be in 1994, for one thing, then changed his mind. His claims are based on numerology. Other evangelicals are coming out against him. And so on and so forth.

We’ve seen such claims come and we’ve seen them go. The problem is, they never really leave, do they? A new one always comes along soon enough to take the place of the last one. And so many others are simply recycled (Velikovsky begat Sitchin begat Planet X, which has been subsumed by the Mayan 2012 folks).

Moreover, the most fervent believers in such doomsday prophecies, after the time comes and goes with nothing happening, usually wind up believing in it even more strongly. I saw it happen myself in 2003 when Planet X failed to show up and wipe us all out as predicted. A lot of people were disenchanted and left that particular cult, but a core group is still going on, still claiming aliens are out there trying to warn us of planetary doom (another site has a history of all that). And heck, the Millerites, a 19th century end-times movement, eventually evolved into the religion of Seventh-day Adventism after failed prophecies of the Second Coming of Christ.

Which makes me wonder: what will happen May 22? I have no doubt whatsoever that when the Rapture fails to materialize, the group surrounding Camping will find some way to rationalize it. Perhaps they’ll claim the date was off. Perhaps they’ll claim it was a test of their faith (a common excuse, actually). Maybe, if they’re lucky, some will leave the movement. But no matter what, excuses will be made.

But that’s in the immediate term. I can’t help but be curious to see if this will continue on, as the Millerites did, and even grow? After 150 years, Seventh-day Adventism is now one of the largest Christian denominations on the planet, after all.

Who will be Camping in the 22^nd century?

Image credit: Mark Nozell on Flickr, used under Creative Commons licensing.

Some (kinda) good news: a bill designed to promote the teaching of creationism in Tennessee public schools has been put on hold until at least next year.

Earlier in April, the Tennessee House passed this bill, which basically says teachers can help students find weaknesses in scientific theories — and while that sounds legit on its surface, it’s actually very thinly veiled creationist rhetoric for attacking evolution (read the link above for more on this).

To be made into state law, the Tennessee Senate would have to pass the bill as well, but they decided to put it on hold. The thing is, it was tabled basically due to scheduling and not because the bill is antiscience, antireality, and potentially unconstitutional. I imagine when the Senate reconvenes at the next session it’ll pop right back up, as these creationist whack-a-mole bills do. After all, this is the same legislature that grossly mischaracterized a quote by Einstein to support creationism.

So science education in the Volunteer State is safe… for now. Therefore:

With the seeming onslaught of attacks on reality coming from all over the country, I hate to add to the bad news… but I will because the bad news shows just how silly antiscience legislators can be, and there’s also some good news to go along with it. So that’s nice. And I’ll end with an article that shows us why those of us in the reality-based community have such a hard time pushing back against nonsense.

The Good:

A couple of years ago Louisiana passed a law designed to destroy good science, allowing teachers to use creationist materials in the classroom, despite this being a clear violation of the US Constitution. So why is this good news? Because a bill has been filed to repeal that awful law. Even cooler, this bill came about because of efforts by a high school student in Baton Rouge named Zack Kopplin, who has been working with the Louisiana Coalition for Science.

In high school I was busy goofing off with my friends. Zack Kopplin is busy taking on the entire Louisiana State legislature.

Good on him! And while it’s still in the early stages of this fight, it shows that grassroots efforts can get things done.

The Bad:

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A bill clearly intended to promote and protect antiscience passed in the Tennessee State House yesterday, by a vote of 70 – 23.

Let that sink in. 70 to 23.

The bill is another in a long series of creationist (and broadened into other antiscience topics) wedge bills designed to weaken the teaching of real science in public schools. The summary makes that clear:

This bill prohibits the state board of education and any public elementary or secondary school governing authority, director of schools, school system administrator, or principal or administrator from prohibiting any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught, such as evolution and global warming.

On the surface this sounds like legit science; after all, science thrives on understanding the weaknesses in ideas so they can be improved. But if you read that last part, conservative antiscience rears its head: the two specific cases mentioned are evolution and global warming.

That doesn’t sound like real science is the motivation behind this bill — and reading quotes by its supporters confirms it. What this really means is that if a teacher wants to declare the Earth is 6000 years old (or make some other clearly wrong ideologically-based claim), that teacher cannot be stopped.

Similar antiscience bills (usually given the Orwellian title of "academic freedom bills") have been created in Oklahoma (though defeated, barely), Mississippi, and in Louisiana, where creationist and part-time exorcist Governor Bobby Jindal signed it into state law.

So this bill passed the House, but it still has to pass the Tennessee Senate. They have their own version up for vote targeted for April 20. If you live in Tennessee, I urge you to go to the NCSE website, read up on this, and then write your local representative.

Because if this bill passes into law, then…

An interview I did with Keith Daniels of the counter-culture site Suicide Girls is now up on the SG website.

I’ll be clear: that page should be OK, but the site itself may be somewhat more than NSFW, in much the same way that standing a meter away from a supernova is somewhat more than Not Safe For Staying a Solid.

I’ve been a fan of SG for a while — it gives a strong, nerdy voice to decidedly non-mainstream thinking in a wide variety of topics, and the interview is like that. We covered a lot of ground: Hubble, NASA, skepticism, politics, life on other planets, the media, and of course Not Being a Dick (while still maintaining a motivating level of anger and passion).

Clearly, after ten years or more of doing interviews, I still haven’t learned how to make a succinct, pithy point. And while I do suffer a bit from verbal diarrhea, I’ll note that some topics deserve more subtlety and longer discussion. Sound bites tend to gloss over vital details, and not everything can be adequately covered by a bumper sticker.

To give you a taste, here’s part of what I said about skepticism:

It’s really easy to fool people, and it’s really easy to fool yourself, and if you use these skeptical ideas, you find out what the truth is. The whole idea of skepticism and science is to find out what’s most likely to be true, and what’s most likely not to be true. That’s the goal: to not fool ourselves, and that’s where the real power of skepticism is. That’s why it bugs me when people think it’s a negative thing — it’s not! It’s the most positive thing we have. It is the search for the real, objective truth.

There are tons of fascinating interviews on SG, including talks with folks like Felicia Day, Danny Pudi (Abed from "Community"), comic book writer (and skeptic!) Gail Simone, and many more. You’ll happily lose a day reading them, I promise!

Two interesting court cases relevant to medical reality came up recently.

1) Yahoo news is reporting that a judge has thrown out a case where lawyers wanted to use religious and alt-med exemptions as an excuse to not get health care. People were claiming that they had faith that God would heal them in times of sickness, and that forcing them to get health care was an attack on that belief. There are a lot of things wrong with this — for example, they weren’t being forced to actually get health care, just insurance — and to be frank, this sort of thinking constitutes a major health risk to the population. It also smells very much like a fishing expedition on the part of people against universal health care, using religion as a "get out of critical responses free" card.

I’ve said this before: as an American I am not thrilled with the government telling me what I have to do or not do, but there are times when the greater good must be considered… and considered very carefully. Slippery slopes are treacherous. To some people "the greater good" is a phrase used to justify way too much, but it also is part of the Preamble to the Constitution. It’s why we have government in the first place. And when it comes to public health threats coupled with a large number of unskeptical people, it definitely comes into play.

Tip o’ the tort to Fark.

2) The Supreme Court has ruled that a family claiming their daughter was injured by vaccinations cannot sue the manufacturer. It’s a bit of a complicated situation, but Orac has a breakdown. There’s a lot of rhetoric flying around, and while Orac’s discussion is a bit lengthy it’s well worth your time. The bottom line is that there is so much antivax nonsense out there that companies making vaccines are at big financial risk to produce them due to potentially costly litigation. This represents a huge health risk — vaccines save millions of lives — so several years ago a special court system was set up to handle vaccine damage claims. This new ruling protects that system.

To me, this whole compromise of a special court is the best that we can hope for given how strong the antivax movement is, and how vast a public health threat it is. I’d rather we didn’t have to have a special court to handle these lawsuits, but the reality is that we need it if we are to protect people from diseases which would resurge if the vaccines were to stop being made and distributed.

It breaks my heart that so many parents are out there looking for answers for their children’s illnesses, but we cannot abandon all reason and all science because of it — in fact, we must stick with the evidence and science-based medicine all the more strongly. If we don’t then billions of dollars will be wasted, and, far worse, a specter will rise once again of many more deaths due to preventable diseases.

Two bits of anti-medicine news, both from the United States northwest, and both dealing with difficult situations:

1) In Oregon, lawmakers are making it harder for people to use religion as an excuse to avoid medical treatment. The Followers of Christ, a fringe Christian group, advocates faith healing and not standard medicine, and as a result several children in that group have died in recent years. Because of this, a bill has been introduced into the Oregon state legislature to remove religious belief as a defense against homicide. If convicted, a parent whose child has died because they used faith healing instead of real medicine will be charged with homicide and have a mandatory sentence.

Stories like this always leave me conflicted. As a parent myself I always want the best possible medical treatment for my child, and I don’t want other groups interfering with that decision. However, the State has a right to protect the best interests of that child in case the parent cannot. Decades worth of evidence has shown that faith healing does not work, and in many cases the children in the Followers of Christ church had easily treatable illnesses and needn’t have died.

In the end, the right thing to do is save that sick child. If the parent cannot, then the greater society has the responsibility to do that.

This opens a can of worms, I know. (more…)